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Category: Business & Communities

Events Managers teaching us the central concept of management

Published September 21, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I had an interesting exchange today with Events Impresario, Julius Solaris.  Well, I had two, but I will tell you about this one.

Julius tweetedd about the lack of creativity in events.

  • I asked whether lack of creativity mattered and whether we would rather have events where creativity happened.
  • Quick off the mark, Julius tweeted: “@jobucks but providing a creative environment is key to foster creativity IN the event”

Yes!  Which the boundary conditions does the Event Manager create, so that you and I can be creative when we meet at the party?

These days, people do Masters degrees in Event Management.  So, somebody must know.

How do students learn this double-layered approach to management?

Which conditions do we manage to raise the likelihood of creative activity by the guests?

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8 must-haves for conferences in 2009

Published September 20, 2009 by Jo Jordan

About once a year, I go to a formal conference, I am not sure why.   I prefer unconferences and most conferences these days are streamed. I could put my feet up and watch at home.

So for me, there is an increasingly “high ticket to entry”.

I think these 5 are what are called “table stakes” .  They are the minimum to be credible.

1.  I want the venue to be clean (it usually is in the UK).

2. I want parking (preferably free). Importantly, though I want details on how and where to park. That means the postal code and how I will pay and for what period. Should I have trekked off to bank to find pound coins in advance, etc. What do I do if the machine is broken, etc.

3.  I want the postal code of the venue. Google has maps and cars and phones have satnav. I don’t want a diagram or written instructions. I want a postal code so I can use the map of my choice. But peculiarities like the number of exits at the Tube, the one for me and direction I should turn when I hit fresh air would be good. London is notorious for not marking its streets.

4.  I want working WIFI and it should work the minute I switch on my device.

5.  I want to know where to get refreshments. In the UK, we usually travel a long way. When the hosts provide refreshments, they really do need to be healthy and match the diversity of UK.  Otherwise arrangements at a local eaterie might be preferable.  I don’t want to ruin my health for the sake of being cheap.

With Web 2.0, I think we get another list which allows us to prepare before we come to the meeting.

We don’t want to spend several days following people up afterward. Ideally, when we walk out the door, we’ve wrapped up our routine business and moved on to coordinating opportunities that arose out of the meeting.

1.  Registration on Amiando because they provide a community. Meetup is fine for non-conferences.

2.  Registration information that does not dwell on rank or institution. Life has changed. I don’t want to talk to you if you don’t want to talk to me! Tell me why you are there and what I can do for you.   In advance. Put up a link to your blog and give me your Twitter name.  I’ll scan the lists and connect up with you before the meeting.

3. A Twitter stream is good but so is a way to find each other.  We must have contact information in advance and our twitter names should be on the participants’ list.

I am looking forward to the wider use of ecards too. I don’t want to enter cards when I get home. I want to send an ecard directly to my contacts database. That’s for 2010.

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Surprise! US is not overborrowed. But does it have Growth Story?

Published September 20, 2009 by Jo Jordan

If you have even the slightest interest in living in the manner to which you have become accustomed, can I recommend you find 5 hours to watch these three videos of 12 economists talking what is happening in the US financial system and its dealings with the rest of the world?

I am just a lowly psychologist so I try to boil down economics to actionable rules of thumbs that we can use.  When you are done, I’d be interested in your take of mine.

1.  Find your growth story . . . and stick to it!

Find an industry that you enjoy, find the bit that is growing, and grow with it, wherever it takes you.

2.  Help you kids find their growth story

Invest in the things they love to do and take them on holiday to parts of the world where growth is happening.

Think abut a good trip to Brazil, Russia, China or India once in three years, rather than a time-wasting, resource-frittering holiday every year.

And if they have any inclination for languages, help them by doing their homework with them.   It may help when you talk to you grand-children who might be living in another country!

And may be include Arabic on you list of possibles.  Bang on the door of the mosque in your neighbourhood and ask them to include your children in their after-school activities?

3.  Remember that money is losing value as much as houses are losing value

Unless you have a lot of it hanging around, this is a good news story for you. Investors will want to invest in your growth story.

Don’t be desperate for their money. You have something as rare as hens’ teeth.

Bring in investors who believe in your story as strongly as they believe in returns on their capital.

And then write a tight contract for them!  This is a borrower’s market, whatever the mass media tells you.

4.  Learn the numbers and ask your MP and business leaders hard questions

The more we show that we know the numbers, the quicker they will get down and dirty with them too.

Let them watch 5 hours of videos on economic more often than we do.  That’s their job, after all. Let’s get our money’s worth!

5.  Vote with your ballot and your feet for people and firms with growth stories

Question the panic about government borrowing.

It may be different here in the UK – I wish we had a forum like these 12 economists here.  Common sense tells us, though, that we will only get out of our mess with a plan – a plan for getting out and moving along with growth stories in Brazil Russia India and China.

We don’t have to eat and drink ourselves silly to keep up. But starving ourselves and living in sack cloth won’t make us any richer either.

Government borrowing is only a problem when don’t have a plan to make businesses better over the next 5, 10, 20 years.

We want a growth story!  Can we start a fashion?  What will happen if we ask everyone you meet, what is your growth story!

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RSS’d to make your dream come true?

Published September 20, 2009 by Jo Jordan

RSS’d?

If you aren’t, it probably won’t!  As a work psychologist, that was a subterranean text that I was hearing at the Oxford Social Media Convention on Friday.

Matthew Hindman, for example, a political scientist from Arizona, tracks how the internet is used in politics in the US.  While we are raving about my.barackobama.com, Matthew is noting details that pass us by.

For example, Obama won Ohio through marginal gains in Republican states which, in turn, were made on the back of careful statistical analysis of voting patterns.  I live in a small town in rural England, and RSS’ed or not, putting my hands on his book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, over the weekend is not a possibility.

[If anyone knows how to efficiently read 200 page pdf files on a screen, please doooooo tell me the secret]

Internet politics is not for the faint-hearted

What I gathered of the overall message is this.

The internet is a powerful tool in the hands of people who understand statistics, who understand politics, and who are motivated to get out there and do the work.

What can political scientists (who watch the way we use the internet) teach those of us in business?

Without benefit of the book and not knowing how to read long pdf documents efficiently on screen, I’ve been thinking about what I heard against what I already know.

  • When the barriers to entry are low, as they are on the internet, “every man and his dog” is able to enter the space.
  • Because so many people are in the space, competition is fierce, and profits are low.
  • Because profits are low, consolidation and scale is important.
  • And people who have already invested hugely (think TESCO’s for example) will protect their investment and are going to play hardball with we ‘noobes’.

Porter’s 5 factor model and my internet business

I like messing around with numbers and seeing what they can tell us about what we are doing and where we are going.  So I look forward to seeing the data Matthew has put together and seeing what analyzes we could do here in UK in both the political and business arenas.

The progress that I’ve made so far, is that I am hearing the principles of Porter’s 5 factor model of business conditions.

  • The internet is an unattractive industry precisely because it is easy to get into. [Barriers to entry are low]
  • When we work in the internet, we have to organize our work to “take care of the pennies”. [Cost leadership]
  • We also have to get quite big to have enough volume to make a profit.

Can I conclude from this train of thought that in the internet world, organizing and organizational skills are critical?  Have we even thought about the challenges of “taking care of the pennies”? [Not a lot! Time to begin!]

And am I RSS’d to do the work involved?

Which of my ventures can I be RSS’d to do ALL the work it takes to win?

[I am trying to remember who made the RSS joke. Iain Dale! Politicians do not know their RSS from their elbows!]

Parallels with running a psychological practice

This isn’t a new problem for me.  I am a psychologist by trade and I’ve spent countless hours over the years talking about exactly the same issues in our businesses. . . oops!. . .professional practices.

We have exactly the same ‘problem’.   Anyone can dispense psychological advice – and they do.  My profession tries various tricks like protecting the name and putting up artificial licenses to stop other people using various procedures.

We do all that to escape the the hard reality that we need both organization and professional knowledge to run a profitable practice.  The amateur sees our interaction with our clients.  They copy that.  They pinch our materials and copy what they see us do.   What they don’t see and don’t copy is the back end.

That infuriates us because the back end is expensive.

When we get over being annoyed, we can turn this relationship around. Our back end is worth what we pay for it because it allows us to answer three questions consistently and better than the amateur who trying to copy us without sufficient investment in the ‘going concern’.

  • Do we understand our clients deeply in ways that they care about?
  • Are we there for them when they need us?
  • Does our analysis of their issues and concerns help them act and act effectively in the mess, rough and tumble of their own lives?

It feels so ‘wrong’ to have to compete with amateurs. And ‘noobes’ deeply resent the cost of the the organization structure to deliver a competitive service and the time it takes to put it together.  Oh, the conversations I’ve had and the time I’ve spent getting my head around this.

But that’s business when barriers to entry are low.  It is part of our professionalism to know that.  Porter’s Five Forces does explain that – in every first year business text.   We should know that we need a professional organization to give our message efficiency, effectiveness and edge.  Sadly, the internet is not easy pickings in politics or business.

Our RSS’d about boxes

So we’d better know what we are RSS’d about!  And hang out with people who are RSS’d about it too.

Maybe we can have two boxes?

Hobby – enjoy it, but can’t be RSS’d to win.

Profession – sooo committed that being RSS’d to do the details comes easy.

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Add these 2 places to your guidebook of the British internet

Published September 19, 2009 by Jo Jordan

At the Oxford Social Media Convention, I met a young man from Nominet UK. Nominet UK registers all top level domains dot.uk.

Nominet UK is a not-for-profit company.  It took a while of clicking around their website to find that out!

That information should be in their footer, shouldn’t it?

This young man told me he was a Trustee and employed by ??? Nominet or a Trust run by Nominet?. Couldn’t find the Trust on the Nominet website so I googled.

There is a Nominet Trust and its institutional framework is clearer.   It is a charity and the information is on the front-page.  I must have been talking to James Kemp.

Here is its purpose

“We will consider funding UK-based and international Internet-related initiatives in the sectors of education, research and development, safety and inclusion.”

What odd wording “we will consider”.

The project must be capable of delivering what is promised.  Shouldn’t we take that for granted?

But this is a link you should remember if you are interested in inclusion and the internet.

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Future of social media from Social Media Convention

Published September 18, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Blogging at 20? The future and potential of social media

Panelists:

Kara Swisher,Wall Street Journal

Dave Sifry, Technocrati

Richard Allan, Facebook

Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton

Chair: William Dutton, Oxford University

If social media are the defining advance of Web 2.0, whereby the network-as-platform enabled users not just to download content but to create it, tag it and share it, what will the next decade hold? Many of the social media businesses whose tools we rely on have yet to make a profit, whilst concerns about privacy, security and possibly even dignity suggest that our online habits may have to change. The technology press has for some time been heralding the oncoming arrival of Web 3.0, as an era where the web gets ’smart’, and research on the developing semantic web suggests that this is no idle prediction. But what will happen to social media in the interim? Will the next ten years see our fascination with blogging, wikis and social networks replaced by a re-focusing on the enhanced informational capacity of the Web or will we continue to Tweet?

Richard Allan. Increasing pressure to regulate. EU took broadcasting rules and applied to internet. When video hs TV like power – it will attract attn of regulators. We want to tak our identity with us – crunch area. Can we let ppl let us develop identities – regulation of identity is an attractive issue for governments. Increasing power of audience.

Daily reach Facebook in UK 9m by 0.5 hr.

Bill Dutton. In US, want anonymity.

Richard Allan. Germany, like pseudonyms. Some sites might want identity cards.

Nigel Shadbolt. Public data should public. Delighted Facebook is promoting portability. Somebody at Google -Data Liberator.

What can be predicted – space and place will be more exquisitely defined. Will be revealed by digital behaviour.

Social norms. Do we need regulation. Let’s have some very clear info about where our info is and we must held ppl accountable or misuisng it.

Question.

?? Strategy for governments. Need data. Lisbon – top-down.

Richard Allan. Next few years. What mashups could you build? Find a loo – Satlav. Get data out of local authorities. Make data freely data – at every local govt.

Kara . .. find Starbucks.

David. Urinary Liberation Front.

Nigel Shadbolt. Need to be able access data. Some inadevertently handed over. Rail timetables.

David. Legal proceedings.

Nigel Shadbolt. Each jurisdiction will have different view of what is a public good.

Question.

?? Who controls, for example, our language preferences. Who will control this in future?

Kara . .. Google.

Dave. .. easily fixable. Geo search. Area of enormous innovatin. Who tracks all that. Commonly available. Genie out of bottle.

Kara. .Google holds back results in China, by requiremetn.

Richard Allan. Geo location is covered by law in Eu.

Kara.. .. computer driven body parts.

Floor/Kara animals / kids – 2 blocks off.

Bill Dutton. Privacy and surveillance. Also issue of quality. Are social networks going to enhance quality or not in your area? Or sideshow.

Nigel Shadbolt. Purposive social networks. What can you keep private? Challenge to build networks with scientists. Interesting engineering to share data. Quality? Next year – most papers in chem.eng will be in Chinese. Data is published with paper.

Kara….. no downside. Scientists collaborative and competitive. Silos. New media is of quality and getting better – take quality and ethics and embrace speed. Do excellent work online and still of high quality.

Dave…. better and be worse. Think through consequences of speed.

Richard Allan. Comparing apples and pears. Comparing content and conversation. Framing doesn’t tell us about quality anymore. We can make wrong assumptions about what we are looking at.

Nigel Shadbolt. Internet . . didn’t persuade Americans to believe in natual selection.

Question

?? Business model scalable to univeral access. Richer, younger, better educated are on line. Will we increase real life differentials?

Kara . .. distribution of technology in States. Universal access. Facebook has turned profitable. Google more profitable than Oprah – did I get that right.

Bill Dutton. Social accountability for small groups of users.

Question

x hours of YouTube – people becoming illiterate. . ..

Kara . . think video, screens.

Touch it, move it.

Richard Allan. Video will distribute President Palin.

Nigel Shadbolt. Empowers illiterate.

Dave…. Had videos for years…. won’t replace multi-modal

Kara . . 4 year olds expect screens to be touch screens

Dave . . . What will be on top today, will not be on top then.

Nigel Shadbolt – silicon will be meat…. lifestyle data …. big

Richard Allan – serious movement of refuseniks

-end-

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Academics begin by dismissing the democratic potential of social media and end there?

Published September 18, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Social media, so what? Assessing the impact of blogs and social media

Panelists:

Stefan Niggemeier, BILDblog

Evgeny Morozov, Georgetown University

Matthew Hindman, Arizona State University

Richard Allan, Facebook

Chair: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Oxford University

Theorists such as Yochai Benkler have suggested that the accessibility and inherently social nature of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, social networking and wikis mean that we might expect them to enhance our democratic freedoms through the opening of new channels for debate and collaboration. Academic research suggests that such new opportunities have not been equally taken up, and that in many areas, new social media are simply being used by old ‘elites’. At the same time, blogs and social media are having significant effect in enhancing accountability and transparency, particularly in repressive regimes like Burma and China. This session will ask whether we should be so quick to dismiss the socially egalitarian and politically democratic potential of social media or whether there might equally be more mundane but significant social impacts which have so far been ignored.

Missed beginning with internet problems.  People kicking the benches.  Photographers blinding us with flashes.  No work getting done here.

Evgeny Morozov:  From Belarus – some countries getting more democratic.  Some activists and NCG’s becoming more effective.

Impact of internet – what about people who are not activists.  All political forces are using it.  Can find connections of dissidents online.  Access doesn’t make people aspire for democracy.  [Why should it?  Technological determinism?]  Says refrain from technological determinism?  [Straw man?]

Richard Allan:  Potential vs reality.  Political practitioner.  Audience had left the building.  Political class optimistic.  Cyberutopia just that.

Apps that allow ppl to have ongoing deeper relationships beyond challenge-response of a blog.   Afffordancies from a political view.

Early social media : pubs (bars) online.  Bars develop a specific character. Talking to the same people.  People could come in but don’t.

Now: Festival.  Arrive with like-minded people but reach out and meet new people and discover new ideas.  At a Festival, we spend time in the music tents not the side shows.  But side shows can arrive and develop novel connections.  Entertainment also still trumps politics.  Can we use social media to expand our networks in novel ways.

Matthew Hindman: Access, openess, public sphere – most people say there are low barriers to entry.  Monopolies -high fixed costs, low variable costs.  Economics on internet are far less forgiving.   What has Google spent on intrastrucutre on R&D.  By end of 2010, Google will have cost more than the Manhattan project. Web has many new niches but saturate quickly.    What is cost of Amazon?  In any established niche, fixed cost are very high.    Choke points.

Who uses the technologies – may onto existing . . .

Democratization – messy business – no technology can make all the values better at once. American public sphere currently very exclusionary – gatekeepers different but disproportionately male, white, highly educated.    Internet does not reach people who take their lunch pail to work.

Marketplace of ideas is more ferocious than ever – imperfect ways of addressing.

Deliberation vs coordination.

View of BO campaign -networks ran centrally rather than distributed.  Disintermediating politicians.

BO won Ohio with much more effective statistical targetting & political history – won in Republican areas of state.  Done by elites.

SGB:

Unintended consequences.  Most important unintended consequences.

Stefan Niggemeier:  Use tools to own end.  Use for spam or evil things.   Don’t think in UiC.  To start internet company can be difficult, but so much easier to be heard.    Know it doesn’t happen all the time.

Matthew Hindman:  Traditional media you will be heard.  Publish on internet you may not be heard.  You do not have to ask permission -you need to catch the attention of a big blogger.    Many possible patrons but still need one.   Some groups are not on line – trade unions and conservative religious not on  line.

Production more open but filtering is not more open.  [push pull issues here??]

Evgeny Morozov. Social media helps repressive media – selective about response.

[Some give and take by panel as I am distracted by media problems again]

Matthew Hindman.  Example.

Question

??  Take focus away from minority -technologies exacerbate divide.  96% of Africa no way of expressing themselves.

MT: Mobile phones in Africa.  Half of Africa can be reached by cell phone.

Richard Allen.  Less interesting in library and more in conversation.  Advantages of being part of conversation (yes or no)?

BBC: Blogs, crimes and national security.

Evgeny Morozov.  Sharing information on cyberattacks.   Need discussion of cyberviolence.   Govt is going pursuing national security agenda – most done by individuals for non-criminal reasons.

Question.

?? Synthesis – social mediators –  what I can do on line?  Seeing emergence of new intermediation.  What do people do with what we do online?

Question.

??  Unintended consequences.   What do panel think about real time public scrutiny has affected public debate?

Answers: ? Citizen expectations that we would move toward direct representation – Richard Allan prefers representational politics.  EM – healthcare debate – 70% discuss myths and then media comes in.   [ confused – Palin talked about death panels to win not to be accurate].

MH clearest result of real time scrutiny has bee higher polarization.  Opinion transformation has been transformed.

Would you improve debate by seeing Twitter stream?  Stefan yes.

Question.

??  Politics is tired in UK.  Polis on line has been  failure.  Is discussing social media a smoke-screen?  Is overestimating social media undermining social media?

MH.  Cable news – most people started consuming less news, some more news, distribution changed.  Lower voter participation [cause and EM: effect?].  Inequality about what people know about politics.  Politics is small part what we do online .25% [demographic s?]

EM: Slacktavism.

Richard Allan.  Is what you are saying on line immediate and significant when they engage?  Electorate are smart.  Voters ignore politics when it is not relevant.  Not tools and issue.

Closing . . .

Very ragged.  Restless meeting struggling with intermittent internet.

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Pithy comments from Social Media Convention, Oxford University, Session 1

Published September 18, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Social Media Convention, Oxford Institute, #oxsmc09

From weblogs to Twitter: how did we get where we are today and what are the main impacts to date?

Panelists:

Dave Sifry, Technorati @dsifry

Bill Thompson, BBC @billt

Bill Dutton, Oxford University @billdutton

Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton @nigel_shadbolt

Chair: Kathryn Corrick @kcorrick

Although the dates of the earliest ‘weblog’ are a matter of some debate, the majority of their growth in popularity has arisen over the past ten years. What are the most important milestones in that process of evolution, and what are the factors that have shaped the successes and limitations of social media? Why (if at all) should we expect them to have an inherently democratising or egalitarian effect? Each speaker will be asked to conclude by identifying the most significant ways in which they think that blogs and social media have had any social, political or economic impact.
Dave Sifry

1. Web as library vs web as conversation.  What are people saying about me? [Technical issues].

Question from chair: real-time search?

Search interfaces vs filter interfaces [*]

Bill Thompson.

2.  Social media is not yet taken-for-granted but what has changed is that “I am no longer in charge”.  Permission is no longer need.  The internet is a facilitating service.  A new literacy is developing.  Innovation is possible because we have removed the requirement to ask.  We are waiting for the last 5bn to join the 1bn online.

Bill Dutton

3.  Constant reinvention of the internet day-to-day but it has always been social.  Email is the core application: social and under your control. 98% of people online go their to use email.  2007 17% of Britons over the age of 14 used a social network.  49% today. 22% [?] have created a blog and younger people are the most likely to have done so.  Technology reconfigures how we communicate with people.  Reinforce existing social networks.  But we also meet new people.  35% of internet users have met someone on line that they haven’t met before and many have gone on to meet them in person.

20% of newly married couples met their spouse on line.

Social networks are competing with search engines for referrals.  [?4 sources : adverts, real, social network, search ?]

Nigel Shadbolt

4.  Thirty years ago, it was easy to have a sense of overview of the internet.  The web demonstrates the unreasonable effectiveness of data.  When we have scale, remarkable emergent things happen.

AI has become augmented intelligence.

Semantic web:  infrastructure that is document-centre to something that gets behind into the data.

Why can’t we anticipate this stuff?  Why are we disarmed by what emerges.  See “Websites”.  Cannot understand cause and direction.  Why did blogs take off?  Social interaction scale allows things to take off.  Self-publication has always been there but pings and trackbacks seem to underly take off of blogs.

Why are we mopping up descriptively rather than anticipating what is to come?

Social media have an exquisite balance between enough features and sufficient?  How is this designed?  Or is it simply, Darwinian “try and discard”?

Social media activity in China varies from here [? details].

How do large scale structures like Wikipedia become stable? And will they pay for increasing amounts of oversite?

Or do societal structures emerge anyway?  Does the web support extremism? Or do people get pushed into the most influential part of the space?  Battle for our attention.

Kathryn Corrick

5.  Web is social.  Got more exciting as it got cheaper.  Reinvention and continuity. Emerging and augmented intelligence.  Problems:  How do we find out what is interesting?  How do we find out what is interesting in China and Africa?

Questions

6.  BT (non-twitterer):  Chinese urls will be come available.  Do we need to learn Chinese?  Bill Thompson:  the internet will translate?  The real issue will be our cultural expectations about what is interesting and what we will pay for.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Massive areas of the internet not available to us.  Spanish network is different.  “Bido” the Chinese search engine searchs material that Google doesn’t cover and includes micro-blogging.  We have good translation because stats does a fairly good job of translating.  And how will we communicate with people who are illiterate.

Kathryn Corrick: I only get English results.  Dave Sifry: you need to ask for the languages you want.  Enormous corpus of data has [trumped] rules.  .  .  .  Liberating and dangerous at the same time.  Did WoW expect to create a virtual market in China and India?  Will we encourage open access to tis information?  Democratizing and centralizing.  Globalizing and encouraging xenophobia.  Will the Chinese start building their own protocols?  What will happen to the openness we take for granted.

Questions

7.  ?? : Facebook compresses the space for first names.  Bill Dutton: Net English – unintended consequences.  Multiple identities.  Nicknames.

Bill Thompson:   Having one name is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Imperfections in the tools create serendipty.  Ideas are not linked because they are similar but becuase of deeper conceptual matching.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Structure and typology.  Condensed areas with weak links between.  Unanticipated arrivals in other places.

Dave Sifry: .  . . we don’t like to be challenged.  How easy or difficult is it to get attention to a  meaningful conversation? How can someone with quality ideas become heard without going through money and capital?

KathrynCorrick:  Doesn’t fragmentation make it difficult?

Dave Sifry:  Not sure that is a problem.  The larger issue is trust.  No singular person to [referencing Walter Cronkite].  Don’t have the same level of massive singular change – is that a bad thing.  We will find out from our friends.

Kathryn Corrick: e.g., Iran, difficult to verify.

William Dutton:  Remind everyone that TV/newspapers/mass media still exists.  More flexibility.  Institutional networks.  Individuals – news platforms on line.  Another independent source of accountability.  Not replacing mass media yet.

Bill Thompson:  Not sure I agree.  Something happening underneath.  Trust grows and is broken quickly.  Mass media challenged, checked and undermined.  Indefensible practices.  Is corrosive rather than additive?

Question

??  Can we anticipate stuff better – raise quality of thinking.  Is concept broad enough?  Ppl don’t use tools like ping back etc.  Contemporary social phenomenon of self-expression.  I tweet therefore I am. IS this @Nico_Macdonald.  I find people who agree with what I say [I find people who can explain what I am interested in!] .  Politics is driving the web not the technology.  Is webscience broad enough in its engagement with societ?

Nigel Shadbolt:  Exteme nich opinion get marginalized.  Conversation about intentions drives people to consensual . . . Not a union of everything but more than an intersection – key areas that acccount for what we see.  Small differences in technology influence social interaction and can be invisible to ordinary user.

William Dutton:  Continuity and change.  A few years ago a few experts . . .  internt more central across all sectors and users reinventing the web as dramatically as computer scientists.  Cannot understand the internet except interdisciplinarily ..”{?]

Question

@inkuna Free at point of use.  Does panel think #So.ME revolution spinning into public policy?  e.g. US health care debate.  Is free-at-point-of use (F) becoming the model?

KC: wonder whether anything

Dave Sifry: How related to US healthcare debate?  . . ..  Ah ……..I see!  Never really thought about it in those terms.  Gut . . . not really.  . . . Someone has got to pay . .  for sustainable business that lives beyond you.  In media around for a long time . . . tradeoffs . . . get users then figure out how to monetize . .  . interesting . .

Bill Thompson:  I destroyed the newspaper industry.  I am sorry.  It was a mistake.   . . Guardian  . . . 15 years  later paywalls are futile.  One more nail in the coffin.  If payments had been required earlier, it might have been different.  Businesses changing so fast maybe only investors are concerned.

William Dutton:  If you charge by use on internet, invisible. BBC online doing well. Advertising doing well – distribution of revenue is the issue.

Question

Brian Kelly:   71 people using #oxsmc09.  The bankchannel is no longer private because on screen in front of us.  We know we are successul if we get spam – e.g., taxis asking us if we want a taxi at end.  Are we seeing commercialization of social media?

Kathryn Corrick:  Until technology gets ubiquitous, it doens’t get interesting.

Question

Shane ?:

KC: Brave new world.

Nigel Shadbolt:  Ecology of applications, information types and needs – much richer shape than used to –  typical with [enriching] technologies.  .  Surprising ways that twitter is being appropriated.

Issue is trust -trust in media, content, services “someon not inspecting our packets”[?]

KC?

William Dutton: People who use internet trust it more than authorities.  Trust is based on experience.  More educated more skeptical but trust dependent on experience.

Bill Thompson:  Dream some more dreams.

Dave Sifry:  Clay Shirky – it is not social media if you can’t spam it.

Before: high signal to noise ratio.  The openness of a hashtag # is that it invites spam.

SEO – how to get traffic – have more interesting material.

Is it OK for a taxi cab to enter the twitter stream.  What are acceptable social mores?

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Oxford Social Media Convention

Published September 17, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Oxford Internet Institute is hosting Social Media Convention 2009 later today:  Assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media.

It is rather interesting when a conversational medium is subjected to academic scrutiny :  the ‘about’ treatment.

I hope to be going over to the meeting at Said Business School and to post brief summaries of the talks as they happen (from 10:30 GMT onwards).

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Do your customers love the way your professionals work with each other?

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

The play, the actors, an ensemble, the essence, the audience

Today, I heard James Roose-Evans describe how he directs a play.

And I thought about leading groups of professionals when each brings their own expertise.

It is so different from working with people who hope to fill our shoes one day.  We have such inadequate language to describe how something magical and intangible but definitely palpable and recognizable comes out of our interaction and is so pleasing to our customers.

What do you think?

“I love working with actors. What is exciting, at the first day of rehearsal, when you have a whole group of actors from different backgrounds and different expectations and techniques and the director’s task is to weave them all into an ensemble in order to convey the essence of the play and share it with the audience. It is a very exciting journey that a director makes with the actors.”

Transcribed from BBC Radio 4, Wednesday 16 September, 2009.

“James Roose-Evans founded Hampstead Theatre 50 years ago. He has written 17 books, including the bestselling Inner Journey: Outer Journey and Experimental Theatre and has directed many plays, including the award-winning 84 Charing Cross Road. He is a non-stipendiary Anglican priest, founded the Bleddfa Centre for Creative Spirit and continues to lead meditation classes. His autobiography, Opening Doors and Windows: A Memoir in Four Acts is pubished [sic] by The History Press.

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